A Year-End Checklist For Evaluating Your Enterprise SEO Program

As the year comes to a close it is a good time to evaluate your enterprise SEO program and ensure that needed adjustments are made.

The best time to do this is actually during budget season so you are able to make a case for additional resources as necessary. But, since budget timing varies from company to company, we’ll stick with a year-end approach to keep things simple.

I’m going to focus on the way that SEO is managed and executed within the organization rather than the performance of specific campaigns, but it is important to note that the two are intertwined.

In-House Team & Outside Support

There are plenty of different models that work, but you need to be properly staffed and supported.

Is the size of the primary in-house team sufficient?

What roles and duties are currently underserved?

Can you justify additional headcount?

How can you increase productivity without overwhelming the team?

Does the SEO team sit in the right place in the org chart?

Are you utilizing an outside firm for additional help with strategic support, auditing, training, validation of your efforts, etc.?

How can you get the most value from outside relationships?

Enterprise SEO Tools

When you are dealing with millions of pages across a multitude of domains you need some help with the heavy lifting.

Are you supplementing your main suite with additional tools for crawling, page evaluations, competitive analysis, domain and link data, etc.? Smaller tools do not scale to enterprise well but they are still helpful when applied in limited, targeted ways.

Are you taking advantage of the Google Webmaster Tools API to get access to all of the data from your profiles?

Are you paying attention to Bing Webmaster Tools?

Site Audit Process And Execution

Strategies and tactics continue to evolve, but comprehensive site audits remain a core component of any good SEO program.

Do you have a clearly defined auditing process?

Does the output achieve a balance of depth and detail with being easy to digest and act upon?

Are you correctly prioritizing the recommendations based on impact and level of effort?

Have you implemented a system to ensure that all properties are audited and reassessed at regular intervals?

Are you using the right intervals? Auditing too often is just as unproductive as not auditing enough.

What can you achieve at a network-wide level, and what needs to be customized to specific properties?

Have you established realistic timeframes for execution?

How many of the key recommendations are being implemented within the agreed-upon time frames? How can you improve this and overcome roadblocks?

SEO Training & Feedback

It is vital to provide training to technical, design, content and marketing teams, reinforcing it on a regular basis. Oversight is also needed to ensure proper execution.

Have you established an SEO training curriculum for all key departments?

Is there a set schedule for mandatory and optional trainings?

Have you experimented with different lengths, settings and formats to find what works best?

Are you providing a sufficient range of trainings on the fundamentals as well as in-depth sessions on specific topics?

Are you balancing the theoretical with the practical and actionable?

Are the trainers themselves good at it?

Do you have mechanisms in place to ensure that best practices are incorporated into the daily workflow in all relevant departments?